Flash!
by The Die Hard
Summary: First becs made me write about Hulk meeting Wynter. Now it's Wally. This is embarrassing. Epilogues added, chapters edited, and it had better be finished!
1. Clark and Wally eat each other's dust

It's All ! BEC's ! fault! It's ALL ! BEC's ! fault!  
  
Standard legalese disclaimer. Wynter and Special Ops are mine. The rest is all invented, portrayed, and made money off of by other people. Crossovers properly ashamed of.  
  
Flash!  
  
"Three. Two. One." The youngest of the three boys clicked his stop watch. The two taller boys disappeared.  
  
When they reappeared, both collapsed, gasping, in a cloud of dirt that obscured both the finish line and the stopwatch. The younger boy waved his hands in disgust, trying to clear a space to breathe. "Seventy-four seconds! SEVENTY-FOUR SECONDS! That was only twenty klicks round trip! What the hell is WRONG with you two?"  
  
The dark-haired boy made a negative head motion, still on his hands and knees, panting. "I tripped. A rock."  
  
"A rock wouldn't slow you down any more than a bullet does! Knowing you, you probably got lost. Or decided to head for Florida. Spring break is already over, Kal-El!"  
  
"A green rock," the red-blond boy clarified, standing and catching his breath. "I had to turn around and get Clark back on his feet. Took him a few seconds. What's one of those things doing out here anyway? I thought you said they all came down in Smallville during that big meteor strike."  
  
"Oh." The youngest boy, whose hair would have given Vidal Sassoon a near-lethal heart attack, scowled menacingly back along their path. "Can you show me where, Wally? I need to give NORAD a ration if they missed a track of anything new falling. Kal, you okay?"  
  
Clark nodded. "Yeah. But I could use a pizza, even if we didn't beat our personal best. I pretty much lost breakfast."  
  
"No penalties for circumstances beyond your control." The boy flipped his secure phone-transmitter open. "Mark? Wynter. We need a food truck at the race course. Yes, enough for Wally AND Clark. Yeah, probably chocolate too. I know, gross. And this from kids who won't eat anchovies. Thanks." He clicked off. "Ten minutes, guys. Can you survive that long?"  
  
"That's a century at my speed," Wally moaned. Clark just sat back and made a pose of trying to wait patiently.  
  
Wynter threw his hands in the air. It was a habitual gesture, especially when dealing with Wally or Kal-El, and most especially with both together. "Come on, Wally, let's try to keep you occupied. Run me through the course. At human speed! I can't see details past the sonic shockwave!"  
  
"You could if you'd cut your hair," Wally shot back, lifting the smaller boy and pegging for only a couple of hundred kph.  
  
"When hell freezes absolutely solid and I find a -- " the rest of his words were lost even to Clark's ears in the wind.  
  
The only survivor of a destroyed planet sat back dejectedly. If there were more pieces of his personal radioactive poison coming to Earth, no telling how much more of the world was about to become a very unpleasant place. If Wally hadn't been there.... Well, his momentum had carried him pretty much out of range, but if there had been any more....  
  
Wally whooshed back up with Wynter, both looking grim. (Clark managed a small bit of amusement that the high-speed trip had made no noticeable difference in the condition of Wynter's hair.)   
  
"NORAD is off the hook," Wynter stated, in a voice as close to flat controlled fury as Clark had ever heard from the hyperactive youngster. "But somebody else's ass is definitely grass when I find them. Kal-El, that thing was planted. The mess you two made around it wiped most of the traces, and I'll need one of the -- Specialists, to look it over, but if it was dropped from any higher than your head, I'll eat it."  
  
"Please don't. I've already had enough problems with meteor mutants to last me a few years."  
  
Wally looked at Wynter curiously. "I thought you were already a mutant."  
  
"I am, but not the Smallville variety." In fact, Wynter's DNA tested more or less normal -- Wynter ran the DNA sequencer himself -- though his brain activity had been sending EEGs into spasms since the day he was born. Mostly he called himself a mutant just to make it more comfortable for other people to deal with the fact that he'd been publishing papers and articles and advice columns as soon as his fingers were coordinated enough to operate a keyboard.  
  
Wynter sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. (Wally ran a hand over his own hair, just to reassure himself that it didn't look that awful.) Wynter flipped what he liked to call his "communicator" (and customized to look like one -- Wally didn't know whether to think that was funny or tacky, especially after Wynter quoted him the various advantages and disadvantages of the different Star Trek communicators) back open. "John? We have a problem. And I think it might be bad enough to justify telling Wally the rest of the story."  
  
* * * * *  
  
Clark and Wally had met on a cross-country run, literally in passing. Since no one else would have been able to see either of them, the shock was enough to bring both of them to a screeching halt, much to the dismay of the property owners when they discovered the furrows a few days later.  
  
Wally saved Clark the trouble of explanations when he blurted out "Barry didn't tell me about you!"  
  
"Um, probably because Barry didn't know about me. Who's Barry? And who are you?" A quick glance at x-ray had dashed his first hopes -- that the boy near his own age that had blurred past him might be another refugee from Krypton -- but Clark had never met anyone with a speed to match his before, and Clark had had more than his fair share of dealings with the bizarre.  
  
One fast stop at a donut shop filled each other in on the basics. Clark held back the part about the spaceship, but Wally had made an e-mail date with Chloe to talk about the meteors and the Wall of Weird before Clark finished his third donut.  
  
Clark used the time to contact Wynter. It was a good thing the secure line came with an automatic volume control, because Wynter's shriek probably blew the speaker on his end, and Clark was still working at turning off his increasingly acute hearing.  
  
Wally, on the other hand, had simply fainted, when he first met Wynter and found out that the man that his mentor, Barry Allen, had so often referred to with reverence as "one of the greatest scientists of all time," was not much more than half Wally's age.  
  
Wynter "borrowed" (read: took over) a field ops station that had previously been used to snare a white-supremest militia group, conveniently out in the middle of nowhere, to run speed tests on Clark and Wally. Wally had learned that Clark had no problems keeping up with him, and didn't have anywhere near his problems with barbed wire or sharp rocks or burrs getting in his shoes or running into trees, except around certain green rocks.   
  
Wally had discovered new styles of running, increasing both his speed and stamina under patient tutoring from a technician who was also a cross-country runner along with impatient lectures from Wynter. Long and short and smooth muscles, balance and stride length and foot placement and.... He was never going to complain about regular math homework again.  
  
Wally had also learned that even at his fastest, and even after all of Barry's teachings, keeping up with Wynter's normal mode of conversation was a full-time proposition. He and Clark had both learned to conspire to keep anything with sugar or caffeine in it away from Wynter, and it was a damn good thing that Clark needed less sleep than he did.  
  
(Wally was especially glad that Clark had never introduced Chloe to Wynter, though he suspected that any "great scientist" who knew about Clark would be keeping an eye on everyone around the Clueless Wonder -- even Wally couldn't believe how dense Clark could be sometimes -- to protect him from himself. Wynter would be especially interested in someone as curious and talkative and sharp as Chloe, considering how easily and thoroughly Clark could be exploited.   
  
Wally was pretty much immune to that sort of thing himself -- he had no specific vulnerability except a weakness for pizza and candy bars, and threatening or blackmailing any of his friends or family wasn't going to buy anyone any secrets except just how fast Wally could move. The government and the cops could have that for free, for all he cared, and any bad guys would get a lesson in the shortest distance between two points. But Clark -- Kal-El? -- apparently had more to lose than his stubborn farmer parents and the whole world finding out that just being in the same room with a lousy meteorite would drop him like a hangover on top of the flu.  
  
Chloe's Wall of Weird didn't include Clark. Wally didn't believe for one nanosecond that Chloe didn't already know that he belonged there. When it came to any mention of Clark in conjunction with the meteorites or anything else "unusual," she changed the subject about her "just a friend" faster than Wally could turn a corner.  
  
And that was something else Clark seemed clueless about.  
  
Wally thought he might like to get to know Chloe. But it wasn't any feeling of rivalry that made him glad she was not part of the Wynter and Clark team. The cautiously-mentioned-in-passing idea of moving at abnormal velocities not only didn't bother or impress Chloe, it made her even more hyper herself. If Chloe and Wynter ever started talking, even he and Clark between them wouldn't be able to keep up. Or keep the caffeine and chocolate out of their reach.)  
  
* * * * *  
  
Clark had been brought into the covert Special Operations fold that harbored people like Wynter as soon as they got the first hint that he existed, since its centuries-old founder figured that the most powerful person on the planet was better courted as a friend than risked as being distrusted, but Wally West was still an unknown quantity with nothing to offer except maybe fast mail delivery, and told only a little about the Specials on a "need to know" basis. Wynter's four-figure IQ was by no means the most dangerous secret they kept among themselves.  
  
That someone had learned where they were and what they were doing, someone who could get close enough to put one of the deadly meteorites directly in Clark's path, upped the threat level of "need to know" considerably. At least, Wynter thought so, and whatever Wynter thought was usually law, even when it involved mixing raw sugar with his soymilk.  
  
So it was that, after that phone conversation, Wally found himself riding in the back of the food truck (heh, he WAS faster than Clark, he'd gotten eleven of the pizzas to Clark's nine) to the not-much-better-than-grass-strip airport where he'd met these insane compatriots, so fast that, even at his speed, he'd barely had time to cram his stuff in his backpack. Whatever "the rest of the story" was, it was something big.  
  
"We secure in here, Wynter?" Clark leaned forward to talk softly, counting it a good thing that Wynter either had no sense of smell or wasn't bothered by garlic breath.  
  
"Mark's driving." Their food master was also a Special, a mutant whose particular talent was a near-atomic level of awareness. Listening devices cringed and self-destructed when he came near. Kitchen appliances failed him at their peril. "You first. Draw the lines wherever you want."  
  
"Okay." Blast it, this never got any easier. "Wally, I'm not a mutant. I'm not from Smallville. I'm from," he pointed upwards and northeast, "somewhere around there."  
  
Wally squinted at him. "Canada?" *  
  
Wynter howled, and Clark glared. "No, moron. Do the neurons in your brain fire extra-slow to make up for the rest of you? I'm from ANOTHER PLANET."  
  
"Right, which explains why you look like four billion people's wet dream. Where's your tentacles and four eyes and such?"  
  
Wynter was choking on laughter. "You'll have to sh-show him, Kal."  
  
"Show him what, the heat vision?" Clark was still glaring, and his eyes red-shifted. "I'm tempted."  
  
"No, no, not inside anything with a fuel tank. Start with the, I don't know, the part about the differences in gravity and solar energy."  
  
"Start with the pizza cutter," Mark called back. "I hate that thing. If I don't get some decent equipment, I'm going on strike." Wynter sympathized, but even most industrial kitchen equipment wasn't up to the load that the Specials put on it.  
  
Clark sighed, shrugged, and picked up the edged piece of stainless steel. And brought it down at full speed and strength onto his splayed fingers.  
  
Wally started to shout and started to try to knock his hand away, and barely had time at his fastest to shield his own face from the flying shards of metal.  
  
Clark had waved his harder-than-steel hand in front of Wynter to deflect shrapnel from the super-brained boy's ordinary human body. "One pizza cutter, kaput," he informed Mark.  
  
Wally gulped, his eyes going everywhere except Clark's. "What Wynter said about -- about a rock and a bullet -- that wasn't just a stupid joke."  
  
"Wynter doesn't make stupid jokes. Bad ones, yes. Stupid ones, no."  
  
"And the green meteor rocks -- what was it Chloe called them -- ?"  
  
"Kryptonite. My native world's name translates as "Krypton," don't ask me why. The meteors are pieces of what's -- left of the planet. That's why they just hurt me instead of doing the weird things they do to everybody else."  
  
"Left of the...?" Wally went pale. "You're not just here for a visit, mister spaceman?"  
  
"Maybe I'll go help terraform Mars some day." Clark slumped. "No, I don't have a home planet to go back to any more. As far as I know, I'm the only one who survived."  
  
Wally discovered a new power. Barry had tried to teach him, but apparently knowing it could be done and doing it had to be connected by some powerful demand. In this case, the need to get away.  
  
He went through the rear of the truck without touching it, and only stopped shivering right down to the empty space between his electrons when his hands were buried in solid ground. He wished to hell he'd let Clark have those last two pizzas.  
  
Mark cursed and hit the brakes. Wynter waved at him. "Keep on going. It's not as if he can't catch up to us."  
  
* * * * *  
  
(* a/n: old joke. "Canada" was actually the name of the nearest village. Look it up.)  
  
* * * * *  
  
The private jet the small team transferred to at the first major airport shut Wally up completely about any doubts concerning aliens. Mutants and aliens apparently came free with the territory, but a modified jet like this cost money.  
  
Wynter shrugged it off. "Our boss made some good investments." Including being one of the founders of several small start-ups that had become multinationals over the past two hundred years, as well as slicing pieces off the top of various better-known spy agencies, but that wasn't need-to-know for Wally.   
  
Clark knew, though. He wished hopefully every once in awhile for the day when Lex might be one of their allies instead of someone that their empaths still viewed with suspicion.  
  
"The rest of the story," Wynter began earnestly, "Is that we're not just a science team interested in mutants. And aliens." He winked at Clark, who didn't know whether to flush or grumble, so settled for going to root through the cookies. "We're a collection of people with a variety of talents and a view of the big picture. We'd like to see the human race survive. We'd like to see the planet survive. Sometimes the long-range choices are pretty difficult to call. I don't pretend to be any more than one of several hundred advisers when it gets to that kind of questions."  
  
"Secret masters of the universe, huh?" Wally looked a little less than pleased. "Or is this the movie about aliens and mutants out to take over the world for our own good?"  
  
Clark disabused Wally of the notion of being faster when Wally suddenly found himself pinned against the bulkhead. "I don't like the way you said that."  
  
"Kal-El, don't be so hypersensitive. He's just new to the whole idea. And as you remarked, his neurons don't exactly keep up with the rest of him. Wally, would it reassure you to know that we have an orthodox Jew, who was nearly killed by his own mother for being a third-rate distance telepath, working side-by-side with a Palestinian girl who was nearly killed by her own mother for being born with fur and fangs? She refuses to do werewolf costumes at Halloween, but her hearing and his telepathy make for a pretty good spy team. They're in," Wynter checked his mental file cabinet, "Morocco right now, but if you want to know why, you'll have to ask them yourself. Clark, let him go before one of you depressurizes the plane, okay?"  
  
Wally had only seen a few examples of Clark's strength, but he was beginning to get the idea that it would be a very bad idea to piss him off. The comment about not being slowed down by a bullet was still trying to find a place to settle in his brain, too. "Oh. Um, well, Kal-El, huh?" he tried meekly, when Clark's hand released his throat. "Is that part of the super-secret spy team thing? Like a code name?"  
  
Clark made a face and turned away, forcing himself not to stomp. "No, it's part of the being-from-another-planet thing. That's my Kryptonian name. And you may as well just call me Clark. Your pronunciation sucks."  
  
"Geez, is he always this moody?"  
  
"And your reaction the first day you found out you could outrun your dog was what, exactly? And you had Barry to coach you. Kal had nobody. Even we didn't find out about him until a few years ago."  
  
"Huh, you knew about Barry, but you didn't know about me?"  
  
"Oh, we knew about you." Wynter waved a hand. "Clark, quit hogging the cookies! We just didn't think you were worth contacting. Until Clark asked."  
  
Wally made a disgruntled sound. Clark snickered. A war over the cookies ensued. Wynter made a pointed remark about Clark not being good enough at flying yet to catch Wally if he pulled his go-through-the-wall trick at forty thousand feet. The pilot and two techs hollered that they were all headed for kryptonite gas sedation if they didn't settle down and quit jostling the plane.  
  
* * * * * 


	2. Guess who showed up, All becs' fault!

It's STILL all Becs' fault, and yes, I'm ashamed of myself for having such fun with it.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Wally wasn't sure what he expected of a place that called itself Special Operations and was too top secret for James Bond to know about, but the most boring industrial expanse of ugly concrete he'd ever imagined wasn't it. No wonder nobody ever looked for them, or even at them. It induced terminal snooze just to walk across the parking lot.  
  
The secretaries in the front office gave a new meaning to the word bland. It was only the fact that all three of them pronounced "Kal-El" with that weird accent that gave him a hint that they might be a little more than your average desk-driver.  
  
Well, that and the fact that they all greeted him by name too, and offered sympathies on losing Barry. Okay, now he believed that he was among top-level spies. He hadn't thought that more than a handful of other people knew the story of Barry's sacrifice.  
  
He had told himself that he was going to quit being shocked about four hours ago, and that was a whole bunch of time at his speed, but every step into Special Operations was pretty much another problem in keeping his feet moving and not stopping to gawk. There were the elevators that went down eight levels instead of up two, and that you had to have your ID coded into in order to activate. There were the walls that answered, when Wynter gave his rapid-fire report (waving his arms and making hand gestures for emphasis) to thin air, with what Wally would swear was a tone of amusement. But he got yet another jolt to the nerves once they went into the main computer room, and the tired-looking and disheveled man looked up from his console and broke into a smile that made him look ten years younger.  
  
"Wynter! So you made it without Clark turning the plane over." (Clark huffed indignantly.) "Hello, Walter. I'm Bruce. Banner. I don't know if Barry ever mentioned me. We -- talked, some, after the accident. The, uh, accidents. We sort of fell out of touch after that. I'm really sorry about ... that I wasn't ... that I didn't...." Bruce looked away, wondering regretfully if he, if as the Hulk, could have done anything to intervene in the disaster that had killed Barry. Wishing he would have at least tried. Hulk would have tried, he hoped. But he didn't know.  
  
It was Clark who stepped forward and put a hand firmly on Bruce's shoulder, wincing only slightly at the residual gamma radiation shock. "Don't they force feed you enough of the 'it's not your fault' line here? The 'you can't do everything'? They do to me. And I could have done more than you could."  
  
Wally frowned at him. He and Clark were still kids. They both still had curfews, for pity's sake. What could they have done?  
  
"And does it work?" Bruce shot back.   
  
Wynter controlled the impulse to throw things at both of them to break up the pity party. He had a great deal invested in having Bruce around, and not just because Bruce was a good intermediary for the only person on the planet potentially in Kal-El's strength class. Plus, he was quick on the uptake, even by Wynter's standards. But if there was anything he'd learned from the Baron, it was that guilt complexes just screwed up intended results.  
  
"Well. Sometimes. I'm ... trying." Clark all but toed the ground. "I'm here, aren't I? Instead of...."  
  
"That's enough," Wynter said, far too firmly for the smallest person in the room. "We have a real problem to work here, and the moping is wasting time and energy. Bruce, the kicker is that someone knows about both our testing range and Clark's meteorites. I know you're not a regular here, but could you help us out some?"  
  
Bruce stood. "There is absolutely nothing you could ask that I wouldn't do. In this form, or in Hulk's. I owe you," he nodded in Clark's direction, "and the superboy there, more than I can ever repay. Give me a starting point and I'm on it."  
  
"I have all the details I could put into the recordings loaded already. McCallan and Noah are headed there now to see what they can sniff up, and they're both on transmitter, so we'll have some more details soon. Right now somebody needs to give Wally here the indoctrination tour before Clark tries to do it himself."   
  
Wynter ran a hand through his, well, what passed for hair. "I'll be in the com room. John is going to skewer me for being gone so long as it is. Miriam's on call if you need anything. Thanks, Bruce. I have a bad feeling about this. We probably won't need you -- Lake and Nicole are due back from Taiwan Friday, if nothing else goes ballistic -- but it's good to have you here, just in case."  
  
Clark was still pouting about the "tries to do it" remark, though being called "superboy" made him want to go hide in a closet somewhere. Wally's open staring between the three of them wasn't helping.  
  
"You're the Hulk," Wally said finally, somewhere between shock and accusation.  
  
"I did say that," Bruce said mildly.  
  
"And you people just let him run around loose here?" Wally rounded on Wynter furiously. "Don't you have any idea how dangerous -- "  
  
"More dangerous than me?" Clark cut him off, deceptively calm.  
  
"He's the HULK," Wally repeated, a snarled yell. "He could -- "  
  
"I can put him down with one hand." Clark about-faced to stand beside, and side with, Bruce. "Well, it feels like what I imagine arthritis would to you, to touch him, but Doctor Banner is no more threat to you, even as Hulk, than I am," and his eyes shifted red inadvertently, "every second of the day."  
  
"You," Wally pronounced, "Have officially lost your mind. You're not just some mindless monster who -- "  
  
"Steals and hurts people and destroys buildings and uses women like tissue paper?" Clark cut him off. "Oh, no. I don't have Hulk's excuse. I wasn't mindless when I did those things. I knew exactly what I was doing, and enjoyed every minute of it. And Bruce never almost killed his own father."  
  
Wally went pale. "You're not -- you didn't -- "  
  
"It's all in the files." Clark moved away from all of them, averting his face. "Assuming Wynter and John ever clear you to read anything beyond your own name."  
  
Wally's indignation at that overrode his common sense. "And you have such a high security clearance because of all those things you did? Gee, what a wonderful recommendation."  
  
Wynter glanced at Bruce, eyebrows raised. Neither of them were much worried about Clark killing Wally on the spot for that remark, because Clark had a permanent guilt complex over his months of being drugged nearly schizophrenic on red kryptonite, but intervention was probably a good idea right now.  
  
"Kal." Bruce touched his shoulder lightly, just for a split second. Whether Clark's flinch was at the gamma ray pain, or the idea of being touched in his mood, he would never tell anyone. "That's OVER with. For both of us. Wally's only known you for a little while, he doesn't know what you've been through. For that matter, you don't know what he's been through. You two might work on talking instead of just running races."  
  
"You wouldn't even blink if someone like, oh, say, Chloe said that," Wynter added craftily. "And you never even bothered to tell her why you were so whacked out in Metropolis. She had to figure it out herself. Wally barely knows where you grew up."  
  
Clark spun on him, shocked. "Chloe knows?"  
  
Wynter threw his hands in the air. "What, you left Wally and Chloe alone? And NEITHER of them told you what they talked about? All the names of all the stars, Kal, you'll graduate to Special Operations agent about the time the sun burns out. Chloe was the one who figured out that there was a red version of the meteorites in the first place, remember? Maybe that stuff really does screw up your memory."  
  
"Eh." Wally looked a little red himself. "No, we didn't tell Clark what we -- mostly talked about. Clark only came up -- a few times."  
  
Wynter was turning several shades of purple with the effort not to laugh. "What do you think, Bruce? Should we put Wally through basic training?"  
  
Banner shook his head. "I think the kid is hopeless. Clark at least finishes his assignments. According to Barry, Walter had to repeat Algebra. He couldn't begin to run the equations to understand what Clark can do."  
  
"You could change, and we could give him a demonstration of arm-wrestling," Clark offered.  
  
"I take back what I said about you having half a brain. Go do your history homework. Lake and Nicole are likely to quiz you when they get back."  
  
Bruce was grateful to, and solicitous of, the super-brained boy and super-strong boy and the ancient Baron who had taken him in and given him so much acceptance as well as assistance, but Lake and Nicole scared him out of his shorts. He would just as soon be in a different country if the insane barely-controlled psycho-telekinetic and invulnerable laboratory creation came back from any assignment in which anything at all had gone wrong.  
  
And Clark could throw Hulk through a wall, despite the gamma-ray pain it caused Clark to touch him (the radiation that activated and powered the Hulk form was similar to, though fortunately not exactly the same as, the meteorites' high frequencies), and even Clark was terrified deep down of the small pale woman and innocuous-looking woman-thing who wore that ridiculously red lead-shielded (to protect other people from her nuclear furnace's residual radiation) bodysuit.   
  
Wally may have had it easier with his older mentor to teach him how to handle his differences, but he was about to learn new depths to the meaning of the word "different." Baron John's stable consisted of more than just headcases like Wynter.  
  
"Kal-El, I don't think you could beat Hulk with just ONE hand," Wynter opined, eyes distracted in the way that meant he was running serious data through his head. "Though we could rig some comparative equipment in Nicole's workout room. She's been aiming for half a million kilograms for a year or so, you probably couldn't break anything rated for that. Too badly, anyway. Tomorrow, okay? I need to look into some stuff. Can you find the food stores on your own? Of course you can. Kal, don't bend the hinges again! The tofu grew a science project last time when you didn't seal it properly." Wynter shook his head and waved abstractedly to them in leaving, muttering to himself.  
  
Bruce snickered. Clark raised his eyebrows at him in understanding sympathy. You just had to take Wynter as he was, because even the Baron had admitted that there was no changing him.  
  
Wally glared at them. "You're -- I -- what did -- and he -- half a million -- ?"  
  
"The trick at that kind of weight is how to grab it," Bruce offered kindly. "Pounds per square inch deformation. Things tend to shred under your fingertips."  
  
"No duh," Clark muttered. "Metallurgy class wasn't so bad, but John flunked me on three physical checkouts in a row and made me go back and heat-ray everything I'd ever lifted or caught at speed to get rid of the prints. Lex still has that damn car, though. Okay, so it was dumb to brace my hand on it when I ripped the top off. So I wasn't thinking straight. I'd never been hit by a Porsche before, you know?"  
  
Bruce chuckled. "Actually, I don't think I've ever been hit by a Porsche either. Plenty of Fords and Chevys, I'm sure, but you out-class me in the being-hit-by-expensive-cars category too. Did Lex ever hit you with one of his Ferraris?"  
  
Clark snorted. "No, but I've ridden with him in one a few times. The way Lex drives, being invulnerable is really comforting. Thank all the stars that John won't let Lake have a sports car; Nicole is the only one who'll ride with her as it is. No physically normal human should ever even be allowed behind the wheel of a 512. If Lex could have seen Wally or me, he'd be trying to race us. If he ever saw Lake drive, it would take the NTSB's plane crash team to find all the pieces. I'd rather be hit by a truck than ride with either of them any day."  
  
"You two are weird," Wally opined at that comment.  
  
"I'm from another planet, and Bruce is the Hulk. Your point is?"  
  
* * * * * 


	3. Wally Learns Some Things

Wally Gets a New Paradigm (bad word! bad word!)  
  
(a/n: thanks to LaCasta for a correction on the psych here, even if she did give me a ration for using the word paradigm.)  
  
Baron John's computer team included not just mutants, but trained spies and detectives, top-level people who'd gotten fed up with working for stupid bosses and bureaucracies and found their way, through various channels, to an organization where real work could be done. It didn't take them long, with the extra information provided by the Specialist trackers, to pin down how the Smallville meteorite had gotten somewhere it shouldn't have been.  
  
"CIA," Bruce said grimly. "I might have known."  
  
"Rogue CIA," Wynter corrected. "The ones who serve a second master. International profiteers. Traitors, not to put too fine a point on it."  
  
"Traitors to the whole damn human race," Wally growled. Two days of indoctrination and training at Special Operations had reversed his opinion entirely on the advisability of his comment about 'secret masters of the universe.'  
  
Just one hour in comm central, watching the hundreds of inputs from all over the world, and the desperate measures that Special Operations people were all too often having to take to keep bad from going to much much worse, had made him avoid the cafeteria for the rest of the day. The world was a much more dangerous and unforgiving place than he'd been brought up to believe. "Giving your all" no longer meant just trying to beat a stopwatch.  
  
Clark stayed silent, but his eyes dropped. Traitors to the human race -- but maybe not to an alien who had been ordered to rule them.  
  
Wally caught it and punched his arm, grinning at him. "Hey, I'd rather have you as a pal than any of them, space guy." He got mad all over again thinking about the 'them'. "Traitors to everyone and everything alive," he expanded angrily, as much for Clark's sake as from his own intense disillusionment. "Traitors to their own families, with their, what's the word, they think they know best for everyone and are going to shove it down your throat whether you like it or not. Traitors who kill and claim it's to save people. Traitors and liars and thieves and -- "  
  
"Fanatics," Bruce supplied. "Blinded by belief. Incapable of reason."  
  
"Psychopaths," Wynter added critically. "Fairly typical of self-important people with a low sense of self-esteem who try to make up for it with the conviction that they're entitled to more without having to work for it, and that it's someone else's fault that they don't have it. Narcissism. They look in the mirror and call themselves superior beings without ever seeing the truth. They see others happy with what they are, and have to find a reason to blame those others for not being happy themselves. Skin color, religion, special abilities.... The names of what they claim to oppose in the guise of self-protection are interchangeable. The problem is always inside their own head."  
  
"But they're after me because I'm an alien," Clark muttered, still not looking up.  
  
"They're after you because you're an easy target," Wynter said impatiently. "One, you're everything they're not. It has nothing to do with your uniqueness. Exactly the opposite, in fact. What fuels their hate is that you use your capabilities to epitomize ideals that they can't live up to, instead of for personal gain. In short, that you're a better person than they are. Two, they found a weapon to use against you that can't be turned back on them. And when we find out who told them THAT, Lake and Nicole will make room in their schedule to deal with them."  
  
Wally looked curious. Bruce looked unhappy. Clark blanched.  
  
"Wynter, maybe I could just -- "  
  
"Bruce, you wouldn't scare people like this badly enough. Even as Hulk, you've only ever hurt someone by accident. You don't have the psychological profile for an interrogator. You're an empty threat in that department. So don't even bother to bring it up again, because you wouldn't be able to reconcile your ethics with the necessities of getting their attention."   
  
Wynter considered the three, appreciating that everyone else in the room was keeping silent, understanding that operations planning sometimes involved the most unlikely parties. "However, since you're here, you could be one jaw of our trap. There's a problem with that, so anyone involved has veto power, but it's the best I can think of on short notice."  
  
Wally blinked at him. Thinking of something "on short notice" for Wynter was about as likely as him missing breakfast. "What's the problem?"  
  
Wynter looked at Wally and Clark reluctantly, as if they were going off to war. "You two would be the bait."  
  
* * * * *  
  
(becs is entirely to blame for the silliest part of this section, too.)  
  
The idea of pitting himself against the bad guys didn't bother Wally in the least. In fact, he welcomed the chance to prove himself to his new comrades. To convince them that it would be worth their while to count him as a friend, and maybe be accepted as one of them. Wynter's comment about him not being worth contacting had annoyed him a lot at first, until he found out that it was the literal truth. Now it was driving him to prove otherwise.  
  
He had lost a great deal of his immature indignation at being taken so dismissively upon his first visit to the workout room built to Nicole's standards. He couldn't even pick up anything.  
  
Wynter warned him not to try the going-through-the-wall trick on high-density metals until he got a lot more practice at it. "Getting stuck at the atomic level might just kill you, or might produce an interactive nuclear-type explosion when your body tried to occupy the same space. But you can use the regular gym to work out like the rest of us. The walls there are only concrete, easily porous enough for practice."  
  
Might *just* kill you. Only concrete. Practice. Like walking through walls was something everybody ought to be able to do, in between trigonometry and English Lit.  
  
But he more than got the idea while watching Bruce and Clark doing their own tests.  
  
Bruce closed his eyes, looked thoughtful, and began to change color and size. Wally started to yelp, started to look for a panic button, run for help, something. But Wynter was standing within five feet of the expanding, darkening body, arms crossed, watching critically, while Clark lounged casually against a weight machine that looked like it could easily double as a launch pad.  
  
"Your metabolism is down," Wynter informed the Hulk. "You don't stand a chance against Kal-El unless you start eating better."  
  
"I don't like greens," the growling voice responded.  
  
Clark laughed. "Me neither, actually. But I'll bring some of our organic corn next time." He stepped away from the counterbalanced pile of metal and gestured with an elaborate bow. "You first."  
  
Wally gulped when Hulk braced himself and lifted. He would have bet even money that there was no living force on Earth that could have gotten that mass off the floor. Hulk grunted, and tensed, and pushed it over his head.  
  
"I am sufficiently impressed with Nicole's workouts," Hulk panted, lowering it carefully. "Your turn, mister Kent. Wynter, did I blow the sensors?"  
  
"No, they're calibrated for Nikki, radiation and all. Good readout, in fact. We can compare your output curve all the way through. One minute, Kal."  
  
Clark shrugged, positioned his hands, and shoved upwards. If it cost him any effort, Wally didn't see it on his face.  
  
All of Wally's effort went to keeping his eyes from popping out of his skull. He'd actually been messing around with RACING this guy?  
  
"Dammit! Kal-El, I meant for you to take a full minute! I didn't get more than ten seconds worth of decent readout!"  
  
"Then use a complete sentence next time to tell me what you want! I can't read minds, you know? Especially yours!"  
  
Wynter sighed. "Fine. When we check your heat vision and x-ray sight next time, I will be certain to explain to you exactly what not to look at. Until then, Bruce gets to pick out your next study assignment. You're as slow as Wally sometimes." He threw his hands in the air. "Excuse me while I go see if there's anything salvageable from the sensors. And run the weight sequence again. Slowly!"  
  
Wally had decided that vibrating through plain old ordinary concrete walls would be a very comforting thing. It would be much too embarrassing to whine in front of the Hulk. And in front of Kal-El....  
  
Heat vision? X-ray sight? Wally had to think that over about three times before he managed to chase and pin down the implications.   
  
Clark. Crap. Clark, who looked like the boy next door, with an easy smile and a joking wink. Clark, who all but whined over donuts and then out-bench-pressed the Hulk. Clark could -- Clark had -- Clark wasn't --  
  
He wasn't even going to try to think about what Clark was any more.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"No," Clark denied. "We don't need Wally. We don't need to put him at risk. It's me they know about, me they're after."  
  
"Mister spaceman, you say that again, and I will hit you so fast you won't see it coming. I am NOT letting you go up against these creeps alone."  
  
"I'll help you hit him," Bruce said mildly, but dropping his voice to a rumble as a reminder that he actually could.  
  
Wynter sighed and ran both hands through his cat-fine shaggy mop. "Is everyone in this galaxy an idiot except John? Never mind. Clark, if anyone was watching to see your reaction to the rock they planted, and I'd bet a winning lotto ticket on somebody watching, they saw Wally too, which means he's already on the target list. If we're lucky, they'll just try to use a kryptonite bullet on him. If not, it might be a radioactive land mine. And until and unless you master his vibration trick, he's the only one who can get you away from at least thirty scenarios that I would really rather not have thought of."  
  
"I could," Bruce offered.  
  
"Which is why you're backup, not bait. But speed is the key. Oh, and guys, try to keep it down to three hundred or so. Momentum is a good friend but a bad master. Plus we want them to see you so that they'll show themselves."  
  
Bruce nodded. "And my change is still too slow for that. And if they located Kal-El using any kind of energy detectors, they'll pick up on me too."  
  
"We have a secret weapon there." Wynter grinned and flipped open his secure phone. Well, duh, the others thought, if there was any base Wynter and John between them hadn't already covered, they may as well give up here and now. "Kurt! Quit stealing the candy and get in here!" To Wally, "You haven't met Kurt yet -- for that matter, Bruce hasn't met Kurt yet -- because he's kind of excitable. And when he gets excited, he makes solar flares."  
  
Excitable? Clark and Wally and even Bruce looked at each other in disbelief. Never mind the solar flares, but Wynter calling someone excitable?  
  
"What did he mean about momentum being a bad master?" Wally muttered to Clark.  
  
"Don't ask," Clark advised. "The physics homework is going to be enough of a pain as it is."  
  
Bruce turned an unfamiliar color trying not to laugh.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Kurt was even more of a shock to Wally than Wynter had been. He was about the size of a nine-year-old, but there was something off about his appearance. Wally placed it after a few minutes: he was proportioned like an adult, in miniature. Not like a midget, but like someone seen through a distorted glass.  
  
Of course, Wally reflected, someone who "made solar flares" might be a little something other than physically normal.  
  
And he was, indeed, if not more hyper as Wynter, at least in the same class. Kurt ran in the room and jumped on Clark with a child's yell of delight. "Kal! Wanna see my new trick? I can melt steel too! Like this, watch!"  
  
And then he wasn't just bouncing with energy, but radiating it. Wally backed up fast from the sudden intense heat, wide-eyed. Clark laughed, swinging the little boy in a circle. "Not around humans, big guy! You'll give everybody a sunburn. Later, okay?"  
  
"I can keep it down!" the child protested. "And I can feel what you like now, even. Come on, we'll go outside, I'll do the whole sun, what's the word, spectrum? Wynter's teaching me. Electro-magnetic spectrum," he pronounced importantly.  
  
"I bet you can. Okay, let's go out in the courtyard. You can melt down that awful statue if you put out a little too much."  
  
"Hah, I can't put out too much for YOU."  
  
"Probably not, but you might kick my energy levels up so high that I'll be the one to accidentally melt that awful statue. Let's aim for control, okay? Or Wynter will give us both more homework."  
  
The boy nodded solemnly and then laughed as Clark tossed him in the air and caught him on an outstretched hand. "Again! I wanna do a flip!"  
  
"Not until we're outside, big guy. And cool it on the microwaves!"  
  
Wally looked over at Bruce. "I apologize for everything I ever said or thought about the Hulk. Kids THAT dangerous are hanging around here? And Clark does HOMEWORK?"  
  
Bruce shook his head. "Son, as the saying goes, you ain't seen nothing yet." He thought for a second. "And a lot of it, you probably don't ever want to."  
  
* * * * * 


	4. Enter the Bad Guys

Warning: no humor at all in this chapter, and lots of bad things happen to Clark  
  
* * * * *  
  
The old building where they had originally set up the race course was carefully reactivated. Obvious to any watchers were the basic supplies being brought in. Invisible to any eyes short of Clark's were the subtle reinforcements. Performing for the watchers, Wally made a point of moving a little faster than human normal as they worked. Clark occasionally lifted things he shouldn't have. Bruce wore glasses and carried a computer around and looked studious. Kurt was brought into the building in a crate, which he thought was great fun. Wynter prowled.  
  
The backup team didn't consist of techs this time. There were ex-Special Forces people among John's converts, too. They were strictly out of sight, though, until the trap had been sprung. Catching the people who were an unknown threat to Clark was priority number one, and nothing worried Wynter more than one of them getting away to warn the rest of the traitors and expose Clark to the public.  
  
He didn't want to believe that there was any real danger that Special Operations couldn't handle short of Lake herself, but he knew all too well how ugly things could get, and how quickly.  
  
The two Specialist trackers had declared the area free of meteorites, Clark following cautiously behind them to make sure, but they were unable to find any current traces of the people who they expected to be watching. Noah did, however, point out an area that she considered to be suspiciously level. "Something was placed there," she declared. "I smell refined metal. And electricity."   
  
McCallan agreed, looking over the various animal paths in the vicinity. "Human footprints. Brushed-out tire tracks. Someone has been here since we were. They even went right up to our building. It's a wonder they didn't break in."  
  
Wynter didn't see anything, but he didn't argue. John didn't graduate people to field status who weren't already proven. "They probably expected us to come back. Can you find any trip wires, any sensors they'd be using to detect our presence?"  
  
Noah pointed overhead. "Satellite."  
  
Wynter smacked himself in the head.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Okay, guys, you know the drill. Assume we're being watched. Assume there's some kind of electrical weapon involved. Assume, oh, hell, that they may have a special talent of their own, though that's not likely, given what we have on their background, but even the nazis recruited magicians when they thought it would serve their purpose. Wally, keep an eye on your surroundings. I know these aren't the ideal conditions for training you as a forward observer, but try, will you? Clark, stay enough behind Wally that he can stop you in case of a rock, but not to lose sight of or contact with each other. Ready?"  
  
The two looked at him impatiently. Wynter had a tendency to repeat himself.  
  
"Right. Three. Two. One." Wynter clicked his stopwatch with an exaggerated flourish. The two took off at no more than Ferrari speed.  
  
"This is boring," Wally opined, stretching his neck and shoulders.  
  
"Don't ever let Wynter hear you say that. Or John, or Bruce, for that matter. They'll put us on TREADMILLS. Without a TV screen, even."  
  
"Gah. I'd rather do the math homework."  
  
"Don't ever let them hear you say THAT, either. And you're supposed to be looking around, not flapping your lips."  
  
"Kent, you're a self-righteous snob, you know that?"  
  
"And you run like a girl."  
  
* * * * *  
  
They were almost back to the building when a wave of dizziness brought Clark stumbling to a stop, and then down to his hands and knees with a gasp. Vertigo contorted his normally perfectly-balanced high-speed senses into a sickening whirl. "What -- ?" The question answered itself when the all-too-familiar blaze of pain caught him full force and he doubled up. "Ahh! Where -- "  
  
"Dammit!" Wally spun and started back towards him. Something like an electrical tingle ran through him, warning him just in time to freeze, long enough to see the glint of a sniper rifle pointed at him.  
  
Even machine gun fire was no real threat to him or Clark. But that tingle.... Electrical weaponry, Wynter had said. Wally hadn't yet tested himself against an actual lightning strike, and something warned him not to take the chance.  
  
"Smart move." The voice was bitter, hateful. Considering that the voice's owner had a gun pointed to Wynter's head, it was a pretty safe bet that they had found the bad guys. "We go after one alien freak, and we get three. See, we rigged the meteorite radiation generator just to stop the," he used a word that was much less polite than "alien freak" when he gestured at Clark, "there, but just in case that thing thought it could still crawl away, any of you fucking freaks moves, it'll blow. They tell me the meteorite dust fallout could spread a couple hundred miles. Maybe that'll force all the rest of you," that word again, "out of hiding. Then we'll get rid of you inhuman pieces of shit once and for all."  
  
"And maybe you'll find out that you and your friends are also inhuman pieces of shit," Wynter said, as calmly as if he were reading a phone book instead of being held at gunpoint. No, Wally thought, Wynter would sound excited even if he were reading a phone book. This glacial forced stillness meant that he took that threat seriously. "Are you willing to kill yourselves if you turn out to be latent mutants, too?"  
  
"You shut the fuck up!" The man backhanded Wynter hard enough to snap the neck on someone Wynter's size if he hadn't known how to roll with it. Wally quivered, but stayed frozen as only someone whose atoms could vibrate was able to stay frozen, terrified as he had never been before at the thought of the number of people who might be put in danger if he moved. Wynter simply lay there, so motionless that he would have believed the boy already dead if not for the glitter in his eyes and the slight smile.   
  
Clark whimpered with the effort but moved his head, slowly, slightly. Wally saw his eyes flash red and realized what he was trying to do. But before he could summon enough energy to turn on the heat, the man that Special Operations had identified as Jackson kicked Wynter once and pulled a shard of green crystal out of his pocket, and put it to Clark's throat.  
  
Wally very nearly said the filthy word himself. Clark convulsed with a soundless shriek of agony, scrabbling desperately but impotently to pull away that piece of Death incarnate. Then his arms fell limp, unable to stand proximity to the shard even as it ate into the skin and muscles at his neck.  
  
Wally would have traded his life and soul in that instant for Clark's senses, because if he'd known where the generator was he would have hit Barry's speed and thrown himself on it.  
  
But Wynter was only sitting up, tilting his head carefully as if inspecting a specimen, as if oblivious even to Clark writhing helplessly in weakening spasms. "You really don't believe you're going to get away, do you? Or that we would have just walked back into an area we knew to be compromised? You were lured here. You think we came alone? I should file a complaint on the poor quality of government spies my tax dollars are being wasted on."  
  
"We'll still be rid of you and your alien freaks." Jackson sliced the green crystal knife across Clark's throat, drawing blood. Clark made a small sobbing sound, working just to hold on to consciousness because he was afraid if he passed out he wouldn't wake up, and trying not to throw up only because he didn't have the strength to vomit and the attempt would only hurt more.  
  
"Actually, he stands a pretty good chance of healing, though his hazardous-duty bonus is going up an extra zero. You, on the other hand, are only alive because I intend to drug you back to the day you were born and make you relive every sordid episode your mother's rapist boyfriends put you through so that I can figure out what makes stupid sick pieces of unrecyclable garbage like you. Put the knife down now, and I won't get inventive about it."  
  
The government agent laughed. "You little mutant puke. I might have known you'd sympathize with an alien invader." He gestured to Clark with the hand that wasn't holding the edged kryptonite. Wynter deliberately did not follow the gesture, holding Jackson's eyes, gaging the man's mental state second by second. If necessary, he was prepared to try to take the guy, gun and all -- Wynter didn't spend all his time behind a computer, his deceptively scrawny frame had been trained by experts.  
  
But if the killer holding Clark managed to force kryptonite inside him and cause internal organ poisoning, Clark might not ever completely recover. He wouldn't risk that until they were out of options.   
  
Dammit, what was taking their people so long? It had been almost five minutes!  
  
Clark tried to make words to tell Wynter to get away, leave him and let him go, to save the rest of themselves., but he couldn't speak. The blood running down his neck felt cold, so cold. The green-rock fever burned in his veins, his bones. He could make out what the others were saying, a little, but he couldn't ... he couldn't.... So dizzy, sick, burning alive, life draining out of him, dying, dying would be a relief, everything hurt so bad, it wasn't worth it, just let it end....  
  
Wynter's eyes narrowed. "The definition of alien invader consists of a little more than you squawk-show listeners get out of your cheap paperback dictionaries. Kal-El is from another planet. He is not an invader. You got a voting card without passing an eighth-grade reading test. You're the invader, the way fire ants and kudzu are invaders."  
  
Jackson actually took the knife away from Clark's skin in incredulity (which had in fact been Wynter's main purpose -- some people were so stupidly easy to manipulate!) and pointed it at him. "You -- you freak -- you're calling me --"  
  
"An idiot, among other things. Anyone less trusting than Kal would have killed you already. Moron bigot. Clark could have snapped your arm before you got your stupid little chip out of your pocket." True, but Clark was so conditioned to holding back, it wouldn't even have occurred to him. "One more time. Let him go. Or face some consequences much worse than being locked up and drugged and analyzed for the rest of your miserable life." Much much worse, if Lake's work with the warhead runners wound up any time soon.  
  
"You and what army?" Jackson snarled. "More of your freaks?" The shard came back up. Wynter flinched, hoping he'd bought enough time. Wally quivered, madder than he'd ever been. Clark gagged when the flat of the crystal pressed against his throat. He would have begged if he'd been able to do anything except choke.  
  
"That," said a basso profundo voice from behind Jackson, "Would be me."  
  
The green hand tossed Jackson casually a few hundred meters, expertly aimed with a rocket scientist's trained reflexes so that it only broke a few dozen bones but left the upper half of his spine intact for questioning purposes. "Damn. Sorry to take so long, Kal-El. I thought they'd be ranged all around the area, so I was circling in. But his other cohorts were just waiting in their truck -- do these guys all watch nothing except cheap old bank robber movies?"  
  
"Can I move?" Wally said tentatively.  
  
"What? Oh, of course. Kurt found the field generator as soon as they turned it on, and I did a 'Hulk Smash' on it and the truck, though I did have to change twice to get through the triggering field. I'm walking around here, aren't I? Walter, we're going to have to work through your basic physics classes again. What...?"  
  
Wally disappeared. The sound of the gunshot barely preceded the sonic shockwave echoing through the dust settling behind Wally's trail.  
  
The Hulk said an impolite word. "I missed one! Dammit! Wynter?"  
  
Wynter had hit the ground at the crack of the sniper's rifle, though he would have been too slow if the sniper had been any good -- or if Wally hadn't intercepted the bullets.  
  
"I'm fine." Wynter stood back up, looking around. "Wally...?"  
  
"Here," Wally panted as he jogged back to them, dragging a limp form. "Faster than a speeding bullet! My new sig file. But I really am going to have to start working out, unconscious bodies weigh a ton. Must be nice to have Clark's strength. Clark? Uh-oh."  
  
Clark was as unmoving as the sniper Wally had tagged at a few thousand kph. Bruce started to kneel beside him and then pushed back, cursing himself. "I don't want to touch him when I'm radiating like this. Wally, can you check his pulse? Wynter, how about his eyes?"  
  
"Looks like shock," Wynter agreed. "I can't really tell -- still having a little trouble focusing from that whack to the head. But the cuts are healing, and his skin is losing that green tint. Wally, be careful about getting close to him. If he has another convulsion, well, his teeth could cut through an I-beam even in this condition."  
  
The Hulk made a noise that sounded like a curse, backed up and turned away. His color faded from green to yellow to tan, the bulging muscles from obscene to weird to weightlifter to normal. He turned back, lifted an eyebrow at Wally's open mouthed protest, and bent over Clark.  
  
"Kal-El? I need to check you over. You took a pretty heavy radiation dose. Can you put up with me touching you for a few seconds?"  
  
"I'll be okay," Clark murmured vaguely. "Bet Wally's butt has a bigger bruise than mine."  
  
"Not sure what you're talking about, but you're the one with x-ray sight."  
  
Wally stepped forward unexpectedly, moving to stand in front of Bruce, though confronting Bruce even in human form still scared him. "Let me."  
  
Wynter and Bruce traded glances. "You sure?"  
  
"You'll have to tell me what to look for, but yeah, I'm sure. I'm faster than," he paused, and tried out the accent, "Kal-El. He can't hurt me. And I won't hurt him."  
  
Bruce stepped back. Wally knelt beside Clark and followed Bruce's and Wynter's directions, checking with his fingertips over neck, shoulders, arms, hands, torso, legs. Touching his abdomen prompted a small sick gasp, but his body's attempt to reject the poison seemed to be gaining ground. Wally described his findings to Bruce and Wynter as he went along.  
  
Wynter hesitated at asking Wally to inspect his eyes -- if Clark was too far out of it, he might take close visual examination as a threat -- but Wally simply took Clark's face between his hands and asked him quietly to look at him.  
  
"His pupils both contracted at the same time when he opened his eyes," Wally reported. "That's a good sign, right?"  
  
"Shock, dehydration, fever, the usual symptoms of poisoning. Pupils even and responsive, though. Breathing clear, heart rate fast but steady." Bruce went over the list with a paramedic's skill. "Clark, you feel up to drinking anything? An IV is kind of problematical on you."  
  
Clark gagged and swallowed. "Not -- not yet."  
  
"Coherent, at least." Bruce and Wynter nodded to each other in deep relief. "He'll be okay. Though the medical team needs to keep an eye on him for a day or so. Wally, can you get him back to the secure room? Kurt can take it from there. Solar energy will do both of you some good, though you don't want to take the kind of doses Kal-El does. Be sure and tell Kurt to keep his enthusiasm under control, and get out of there if he starts talking about supernovas."  
  
"No prob, man." Wally kicked his metabolism into high gear and lifted Clark's hundred-twenty kilograms as if he were a small child. "I'm getting the hang of this control thing. Who'd've thought I'd ever enjoy science classes? Mutants and aliens and great food. This place could be a vacation resort if you just had a beach and a teacher who didn't turn into the Hulk."  
  
"Wally." Clark's voice was careful and weak, but steady.  
  
"Yeah? Sorry, guy, didn't mean to ramble on. We'll be there in a flash."  
  
"Just -- put me down for a minute. I can walk. With a little help. But can we please not move real fast or talk about food right now?"  
  
* * * * * 


	5. Two light epilogues and one dark

Epilogue 1  
  
Wally does his homework.  
  
It didn't take Clark long to recover his appetite, once Kurt turned the equivalent of a white sun on him. There wasn't enough left of the armored building to make it worth rebuilding, though. Wally took off with Wynter when the boy's control began to waver ("excitable," Wynter reminded Wally), but they both still got a sunburn. Wally considered the disadvantages of being a redhead. Bruce changed just in time to keep from getting fried himself. He grumbled about the green skin peeling to dull gray the whole trip back.  
  
The science classes were much more humiliating than being stymied, however temporarily, by a few lousy CIA rogues. Though Bruce publicly took back his comment about Wally being hopeless. "I missed that sniper cold, son. If you hadn't been there, he might have gotten Wynter and Kal-El both. That was some fast thinking on your feet."  
  
But even Kurt beat both Clark and Wally on everything from energy measurements (not surprising, Wynter and the other energy-handling Specials had been force-feeding Kurt the necessary control of his talent for years) to orbital trajectories (Kurt was a space nut, with models and posters everywhere -- he'd nearly burned down the admin building in joy when he found out that Clark was an alien -- and had played space exploration games on the computer since he was six, but nobody told Wally that).  
  
Wally caught on to tangents and vectors eventually, but Bruce had to go lock himself in Nicole's room to keep Clark from hearing him laugh so hard he almost changed accidentally when he checked Clark's results -- if Kal-El was ever going to master his flying talent, he was going to have to learn the difference between a parabola and a hyperbola. Even in the bad old days, Hulk could hit a target better than Clark could.  
  
Wally and Clark even lost to three teenage girls on the velocity equation tests, which was seriously embarrassing for the speedsters. Wally fumed and Clark sulked until Wynter and Bruce took pity on them and admitted that they'd been set up to compete against field agents in training, including a natural weapons expert and one who could teleport small objects.  
  
Wally decided to find that funny for a change and take it in stride. Clark continued to sulk.  
  
Unfortunately for Wally, aside from the fully-stocked 24-hour food service area and the chance to race Clark and wear out shoes until he was actually tired enough to sleep for eight hours straight, Wynter and Bruce and their other instructors cut them no other slack.  
  
"I'll take hazardous duty over the ten-hour school days any time, even without combat pay," Wally grumbled over and over. "When do we freaking graduate from this torture chamber?"  
  
He didn't believe it when Clark smirked at him and told him that the next round of lessons were going to be way worse. He didn't believe it when Wynter threw his hands in the air and proclaimed them "the two most stubborn ignorant brats who've ever been through here." He didn't believe it even when Kurt had the audacity to wink at him and called him a plain old ordinary human, and wait'll you see the laser course, and boy, you better hope Chloe never meets Dylana, because she cheats.  
  
He finally believed it when the Hulk came up behind him (he still nearly jumped out of his sneakers when Bruce did that in his big green persona), shook his head at the answers on his screen, put his hand on his shoulder, and simply said "You don't."  
  
* * * * *  
  
Epilogue 2  
  
Lake and Nicole. Fair warning. Not comic-book type violence.   
  
Skip to Epilogue 3 if you want the fun stuff and don't want to risk nightmares.  
  
Jackson and his compatriots whispered their plans to each other as well as they could. All of them had been injured by the green monster, but that just served to sharpen their fervor. When they broke free, they were going to tell the world about the monsters and menaces and the alien invader. They were going to have them all locked up and dissected alive. They were going to indulge their darkest fantasies against the not-humans. They would have their revenge.  
  
The door to their cubicle opened. Ronald, just as they had planned, positioned himself to smash the face or neck of whoever it was, and use the commotion to summon any other guards.  
  
Ronald, much to his astonishment, suddenly found himself paralyzed, unable to even breathe. He would have collapsed, except that his muscles couldn't move. The cessation of sound from the others indicated that they were similarly frozen.  
  
A small pale woman walked into the room, casually, as if looking around in a museum. A large dark woman followed her, closing the door behind her with exaggerated carefulness, and leaned against it with her arms crossed as if bored.  
  
The conspirators discovered that they could breathe again, but their first attempt at a concerted rush proved that they had not been released from whatever force was holding them.  
  
The small woman with the glacier eyes walked around them slowly, one finger lightly stroking her lower lip in consideration. "They were pretty good," she said reluctantly, directing her comment to her partner. "No legal evidence linking them to their boss, and we can't bring him down without revealing our own insiders. No way of exposing this particular neo-con traitor cell without exposing Kal-El. And the coded contact information went back through their official lines. We'll have to dismantle half the CIA to get the rest of them."  
  
"You can't touch us, bitch!" Jackson snarled. "When we get back -- "  
  
He was cut off by his own attempt to scream as Lake's psycho-telekinetic touch flitted through the pain center of his brain while she also shut down the rest of his nerves. The others discovered that they couldn't breathe again, either.  
  
Nicole, leaning against the door, shook her head. She could have told them to tread cautiously, if she hadn't felt like doing a "Hulk smash" on these turds herself. When Lake touched her lips like that, even Nicole treaded carefully.  
  
"Get back?" Lake said softly. "Hm. Where, and when, you 'get back' to, will depend on just how useful you prove." She circled them again, and let her hand slip down and her eyes hood in a way that anyone who didn't know her would have found sensual. "To me."  
  
Anyone who did know Lake would have run screaming as far and as fast as they could. Not that it would have done them any good.  
  
Lake leaned over, her slim body making a very nearly suggestive pose. "You can 'get back' to hell now, or you can enjoy it here for awhile."  
  
Nicole was glad mostly that they had lined the place with lead and electronic interrupters. Wally and Bruce hadn't been given full access to the file on Lake yet, and Clark's morbid curious speculation about what he did know would be giving him a hard enough time keeping food down as it was, without being tempted to actually watch their interrogation.  
  
She took out her pad and marker. It always amused the laboratory creation that she was the one to play good cop to the mostly-human Lake's bad cop. Lake was also better at taking dictation, but if Nicole missed a word here and there, that was just too bad. A voice recorder would have been useless through the screams.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Epilogue 3  
  
There's homework, and then there's homework  
  
"Three, two one." Wynter clicked his stopwatch. Clark and Wally were invisible before his thumb let up.  
  
Wally and Clark's teen-male-caveman competitiveness had changed, subtly but perceptibly, since Wally's participation in the capture and rescue. Clark still insulted Wally, but it was unmistakably toned with respect. Wally still teased Clark, but in their more serious moments (and not just when Clark was arguing with Bruce about homework), Wynter wasn't the only one to detect both sympathy and a certain deference from him.  
  
(The idea of arguing with Bruce still terrified Wally, even when he wasn't in big green form. Wally got positively circle-eyed when Clark would throw a minor snit-fit at the Hulk over being corrected during a chemistry lab.)  
  
Wynter had hopes of the two becoming a good team some day. Wally was no match for Lex in the power and fascination department, but he was something that Kal-El needed far more -- a companion who already understood the other side.  
  
Wally reappeared in what looked like a tumbling roll, head over heels over teakettle. Wynter spared a second of severe concern until he realized that Wally was holding his stomach laughing.  
  
"Eleven thousand six hundred fifty kph, give or take five, not bad," Wynter calculated, glancing at the stopwatch. "Counting the turnaround. Unless you cut a corner. What's so damn funny, and where's Kal-El?"  
  
Wally was still giggling when Clark slid to a stop, red faced, with that all-too-Clark expression of mixed humiliation and resentment. "Shut up," he half-whined, half-snarled at Wally.  
  
Wally only laughed harder. "Superboy there," he wheezed, waving a hand weakly in Clark's direction, "he," gasp, "he ran into," snort, "a STOP sign."  
  
Wynter looked back and forth between them in disbelief. Sure enough, there were shreds of metal and bits of asphalt in Clark's hair. The steel that had disintegrated when Clark went through it with enough energy to partially melt it had curled into what looked like ringlets.  
  
Clark sulked. Wynter threw his hands in the air. Wally managed to quit having hysterics for a tenth of a second -- long enough to catch the stopwatch, at least.  
  
* * * * *  
  
a/n: yes, I'm the metallurgist, but the steel ringlets are entirely LaCasta's fault. Go leave snarky reviews on her stuff. And for pity's sake, don't give Becs any more ideas! 


End file.
